Cleric who offered Modi skullcap to campaign against him in Varanasi

Mehdi Hasan with Modi during Sadbhavna fast in September 2011 when the chief minister declined his request to wear a skullcap. (Archive)

Maulana Mehdi Hasan Baba, who shot to fame during chief minister Narendra Modi’s Sadbhavna event in September 2011 when the latter declined his request to wear a skullcap, is going to embark on anti-Modi campaign in Varanasi ahead of the Lok Sabha polls there.
He is slated to leave for Varanasi on Friday, along with a few friends and well-wishers. Varanasi goes to polls on May 12.

All he seeks from his followers is not money, but volunteers to go and work with him in the campaign against Modi in Varanasi. “Mujhe chanda nahin banda chahiye (I need people, not money),” said the cleric who terms his campaign as “Bharat Bachao Desh Bachao”.

“I keep travelling with the motive of cleansing dirt from politics, with a message that all good people should come out together against bad politicians,” he said over the phone from Thasra town of Kheda district. He said he had been holding his spiritual programmes continuously for the past 25 years. “This time, there will be a mission too. We will be asking the people of Varanasi to vote against Modi and save the country.”

He said he feared for the future of the country as politicians and religious leaders hold sway over the society. “These people are spreading sins in the name of religion,” he said. Asked why Varanasi, and not Vadodara, was chosen to oppose Modi, he said: “I have to save Kashi from such people and save the prestige of Kashi which is the seat and soul of of India’s culture.”

“It is a special mission to help defeat Modi, who wants to set up his one-man government,” he said. There is no BJP or NDA sarkar, but only Modi sarkar being propagated, he added. “Democracy is being misused by politicians for electoral gains. They are bringing down the level of politics itself,” he said.